YMMV / Tom and Jerry: The Movie

• All Animation Is Disney:
  • This trope combined with the fact that it was produced and released while the Disney Renaissance was going on can explain many of the rather questionable choices made with this film...
  • Also not helped by the fact that Disney ultimately ended up with the theatrical distribution rights to the film in North America. Granted, it was released under Miramax Films but Tom and Jerry were still for a brief period meetable characters at Disney Theme Parks as part of the film's promotion. Also, a restaurant at the former Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney's Hollywood Studios) had a large wooden sign of the title characters and Robyn out in the open for years after the film's release.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The alley cat gang let Tom join in their musical number after previously being hostile to him, but still chased him when he escapes during it. Did they not want to let him off easy for being on their turf, or were they starting to warm up to him and genuinely didn't want him to leave?
  • Lickboot's pleas to convince Robyn to get out of the burning cabin stemmed from a genuine concern about her well-being and a case of Even Evil Has Standards or was he more worried about the legal consequences him and Figg would face had any harm happened to the girl?
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The Tom and Jerry shorts are well known for three things: their lack of dialogue, their incredibly fierce rivalry, and the abundance of slapstick present. Naturally, this movie messes with all three of those key elements: Tom and Jerry speak constantly, they are now friends (they were frenemies in the cartoons at most), and there's barely any slapstick involving them. Furthermore, the cartoon's already established supporting characters such as Spike and Tuffy are not present at all, and the titular duo end up reduced to sidekicks while a little girl and a whole other cast of new characters more-or-less hijack the film. Naturally, most fans of the duo were not pleased.
• Awesome Art: For all its problems, the fluid, smooth animation sure isn't one of them. The painted backgrounds are also really pleasant to look at.
• Awesome Music: The score, provided by Henry Mancini. Even the songs have some pretty nice scores themselves with a good example of this being the Opening Theme which plays over the credits: a jazzy remix of the original theme. Heck, the soundtrack even has an extended pop version!
• Base-Breaking Character: Robyn Starling. She's hated by many, since she's essentially stealing the plot away from the titular duo. However, some are willing to defend her, arguing that she isn't a particularly annoying or badly-written character and that she could've worked in her own film.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Between Puggsy's capture and the duo meeting Robyn, Tom is cornered by a gang of alley cats, who have their own musical number before Jerry comes to Tom's rescue. These characters come completely out of nowhere, they never reappear, and the scene itself is immediately forgotten.
• Bile Fascination: For many fans and casual viewers, the only reason to see it is to see just how completely it missed the point of the cartoon.
• Cliché Storm: The whole movie, at least as soon as Robyn is brought in anyway. From that point the movie turns into a generic Disney-esque musical about a girl trying to find her father, a plot already beaten into the ground by several past children's movies, all the while being pursued by a bunch of stock villains from every animated movie you've seen.
• Critical Backlash: The movie was met with a lot of scornful reviews, with made it out to be the biggest blight on the Tom and Jerry franchise. Once the heat died down though, many who came back to give it a rewatch found that, yes, it's a Cliché Storm aping the Disney Animated Canon and the titular duo are reduced to sidekicks in their own movie, but beyond that, it's really just a forgettable but harmless '90s kids movie, and it's at least never boring and littered with unintentionally funny moments.
• Dancing Bear: Many have accused the film of being this, saying it uses the fact that it is the first feature film starring Tom and Jerry as a marketing gimmick, as the contents within the film have little to do with the shorts otherwise.
• Designated Villain: Captain Kiddie's only "crime" was attempting to return Robyn to her legal guardian so he could collect the $1,000,000 reward. Sure, his greed and opportunism got the best of him, but Kiddie had no way of knowing Robyn was telling the truth about how terrible Aunt Figg was.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Lickboot and Dr. Applecheek due to their memetic nature. The former being voiced by Tony Jay probably helps too, given Jay's prolific career with roles such as Frollo, as does the fact that he at least tries to save Robyn near the finale, making him the only human character (and, aside from Tom, Jerry, and arguably Captain Kiddie, the only character in the movie overall) to be anything other than either completely good or completely evil.
  • Robyn's father AKA Indiana Jones with a moustache. Which is more funny if you consider that Tom Selleck was the original choice to play Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark if scheduling conflicts with Magnum, P.I. would not have forbidden him.
  • Ferdinand. Thanks to him being a dog, his scenes are memorable largely because his weight is Played for Laughs more often than Aunt Figg's. Michael Bell uses an uncharacteristic squeaky voice for him, which says a lot considering how polarizing it was to have Tom and Jerry Suddenly Speaking.
• Fanon Discontinuity: It's completely disowned by fans of the classic cartoons for abandoning everything central to the comedic duo.
• Ham and Cheese: Tony Jay as Lickboot ("We've got to have... MONEY.")
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • As mentioned under Funny Moments, Droopy's cameo is seen as one of few legitimately funny moments. Years later, another cameo by Droopy would be seen as one of the few actually funny parts of another contentious Tom and Jerry film.
  • Lickboot's particular choice of words when describing what will happen if Robin doesn't turn up.
    "Without Robin, Daddy Starling's trust fund money will go bye, bye, bye."
  • Both Richard Kind and David L.Lander would play the voices of grasshoppers in A Bug's Life, 6 years later.
  • The original mock-horror teaser trailer has a narrator ominously warning viewers "It's coming... You can't run. You can't hide. Nothing can stop it," as if the movie were some type of monster or deadly threat. Given the movie's notoriously bad reputation, it now seems as if the trailer was warning us of how bad it would be.
• I Knew It!: There is a fan theory that the titular duo actually enjoy their game of cat and mouse. This film sort of confirms it; once they're homeless, Tom and Jerry get along like a house on fire.
• Memetic Badass: Robyn's father, if only because he's a blatant Captain Ersatz of Indiana Jones. With a mustache. The Nostalgia Critic notices this in his review.
  It's Robyn's father, Indiana Jones!
• Memetic Molester:
  • Dr. Applecheek, because of a scene where he creepily stalks... an ice cream cart.
  • Captain Kiddie's design bears an unsettling resemblance to a stereotypical child molester, though the character never does anything predatory and isn't quite as memetic.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "We've got to have...MONEY."
  • Dr. Applecheek slowly creeping towards an ice cream cart with a Slasher Smile on his face and the cart's creepily relaxing jingle playing over the scene. Many have joked that the scene looks less like he's going to just steal the ice cream cart, and more like he's going to murder and/or rape the ice cream man, the viewer, or the cart first. The fact that we never see the ice cream man again after this only adds fuel to the fire.
  • The song, "What Do We Care" became VERY popular to mix with other villains from every source on YouTube.
  • "I'm Tom." "I'm Jerry." "...YOU TALKED!"^ExplanationTom and Jerry's first scene of them talking has been subject to edits featuring other rival characters known for being mute, from Kirby and King Dedede, to Rocky and Teardrop.
• Moment of Awesome: Tom and Jerry escorting Robyn to safety from the burning cabin. Then, Mr. Starling rescues her from the top via helicopter. He accidentally leaves Tom and Jerry behind, although they turn out okay.
• Moral Event Horizon: Figg crosses this twice.
  • First when she attempts to have Tom and Jerry put down by Dr. Applecheek simply for trying to help Robyn.
  • Next and more despicable, is when she refuses to rescue Robyn from the fire she accidentally started, despite Lickboot's worries for her safety.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Despite not having much screentime, Dr. Applecheek is a surprisingly unsettling villain. He portrays himself as a kindly vet who loves animals and allows people to drop off lost pets for him to take care of, but in reality is a greedy con man who makes money off of pets that he kidnaps and sells back to their distraught owners. All the while, he abuses the poor creatures and treats them less like living things and more like money-making commodities. Even his own henchmen are terrified of him.
  • After Applecheek's thugs abandon him to take Robyn's reward money for themselves, he spots an ice cream cart where small children are lining up. He pulls a creepy smile and slowly approaches the cart, while the relaxing music continues playing, and is later shown driving it during the big chase scene. We never see what happened to the actual ice cream man.
  • When the group arrive at Robyn's Nest, Robyn rushes inside to greet her father, only to find out that Figg and Lickboot have already beaten them there. The cheery music immediately changes to a monotone Scare Chord as Figg suddenly steps into the light, which highlights her Uncanny Valley Makeup and gives her an unsettling resemblance to Ursula.
    Robyn: Daddy?
    Figg: Daddy... IS DEAD!
  • After this, Robyn tries to get away again, but in the struggle Figg knocks over a kerosene lamp, which results in Robyn's Nest being set ablaze. Unlike the original Tom and Jerry cartoons, where burning buildings and fire were just instruments for slapstick, the danger of this situation is played completely straight, as Robyn is trapped inside and the duo need to rescue her, almost at the cost of their own lives.
  • The teaser trailer made the year prior to its release. It consists of creepy music, an ominous narrator talking about how something's "coming," and finally Tom and Jerry screaming at the sight of each other while "Psycho" Strings play in the background. You'd think the duo were in a horror movie!
• Older Than They Think:
  • This isn't the first time that Tom and Jerry are changed from mortal enemies to best friends. The Tom and Jerry Show had the duo as friends and aired 17 years before the movie hit theaters.
  • There were also times in the original shorts where Tom and Jerry would talk, sing and/or be friendly with one another. Though with the former, the difference was they only talked in small intervals, never lasting for the majority of the shorts.
• Padding: While it's questionable exactly how many elements are truly necessary and how many are there just to pad it up to feature length, the one thing that seemingly everyone agrees to have been wholly unnecessary is the alley cats and their song. Similarly, while Captain Kiddie does make some minor contributions to the plot by saving Robyn and later telling Figg where she is, most critics agree that the character didn't need to have his own musical number.
• Paranoia Fuel: Barring Robyn's father and the briefly seen policeman, just about every adult character, even the ones who seem nice at first such as Captain Kiddie and Dr. Applecheek, turn out to be greedy opportunists or straight up villains.
• Questionable Casting: Dana Hill as Jerry. While the reasoning for having Jerry be voiced by a woman was likely to make him sound small and high-pitched (befitting a tiny mouse), the voice Hill gave him is the same one she used to voice young boy characters like Max Goof, thus making Jerry sound like a child, and is incredibly jarring opposite the clearly adult voice of Richard Kind as Tom.
• Retroactive Recognition: Who was Tom's voice in this movie? None other than future Pixar regular Richard Kind!
  • Likewise, Robyn’s voice actress Anndi McAfee went on to have a long career in voice acting after this movie. Most notably as Phoebe Heyerdahl.
• The Scrappy: Despite a relatively limited role, Puggsy is hated for his obnoxiously friendly personality, cutesy and clashing character design, and for being the one that convinces Tom and Jerry to put aside their differences and become friends.
• Signature Scene: Tom and Jerry talking for the first time when introducing themselves.
• So Okay, It's Average: If not for Tom and Jerry being the (alleged) main characters, the movie most likely would have been forgotten within the flood of animated films that tried to copy Disney's success in the early 1990s.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: While not a true adaptation and being original music, Henry Mancini's score is clearly inspired by the original melodies composed by Scott Bradley from the original Tom and Jerry cartoons.
• Squick:
  • When Jerry slices Tom to pieces during their sword fight in the opening, we actually see Tom's insides rather than the cartoon's usual Bloodless Carnage.
  • Figg and Lickboot look as if they're about to kiss at the end of their Villain Song. There's some implication to romance between them throughout.
  • Figg sucking cream off her fingers after eating an eclair.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The general reaction of existing T&J fans due to such drastic changes in tone and content from the original shorts.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Tom and Jerry being made homeless and having to put aside their rivalry to survive could have easily made a compelling story in its own right, and is near-unanimously agreed to be the best part of the film. Unfortunately, this only takes up the first ten minutes before they meet Robyn.
  • During the "Friends To The End" song, Tom and Jerry still struggle to find harmony, and even after Jerry saves Tom from the alley cats, Tom insists that Jerry not call him "pal", indicating that they still have a long way to go before actually considering each other friends. This potential conflict is completely abandoned after Robyn is introduced, and Tom and Jerry's friendship is not tested or strained in any way from that point on (at least until the ending gag).
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: For as much controversy as having Tom and Jerry speak has received, many fans agree that Richard Kind and Dana Hill are at least trying their best to turn in good performances in a film where they're almost relegated to side-characters despite their names being in the title.

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